Thoughts

. I have a question. How come in most high schools they now drug test the majority of students. Is it really a schools responsibility especially one in the public sector to test all of the students that go there. No. Not only are high school’s now violating individual freedoms, but this process will also cost lots of money. That’s money that could be used to help perform a schools primary roll to educate. I think that schools are too focused on discipline and not on their primary task which is to educate the students. Take my high school for example. We never had a problem with gangs, stabbings, shooting etc, but now there are 2 police officers and they can randomly drug test any student whom drives to school. Last year a s a senior I took civics, the books were literally held together by tape and hot glue and were from 1998. So instead of buying civics text books which the state board of education mandates as a class we bought a rent a cop who simply walks around the school and hassles certain types of people all day long. Also, shouldn’t America have free post-secondary education? I honestly probably wouldn’t be able to come to college if it weren’t for the Peoria Promise Scholarship. I feel that we should extend this possibility to all students in the U.S. if not in the world.

thoughts

. I have a question. How come in most high schools they now drug test the majority of students. Is it really a schools responsibility especially one in the public sector to test all of the students that go there. No. Not only are high school’s now violating individual freedoms, but this process will also cost lots of money. That’s money that could be used to help perform a schools primary roll to educate. I think that schools are too focused on discipline and not on their primary task which is to educate the students. Take my high school for example. We never had a problem with gangs, stabbings, shooting etc, but now there are 2 police officers and they can randomly drug test any student whom drives to school. Last year a s a senior I took civics, the books were literally held together by tape and hot glue and were from 1998. So instead of buying civics text books which the state board of education mandates as a class we bought a rent a cop who simply walks around the school and hassles certain types of people all day long. Also, shouldn’t America have free post-secondary education? I honestly probably wouldn’t be able to come to college if it weren’t for the Peoria Promise Scholarship. I feel that we should extend this possibility to all students in the U.S. if not in the world.

Writing

One time writing went particularly bad for me was when I was in 8th grade. The writing assignment was to take any song and somehow relate it to your life. I toke the song Jesus of Suburbia by Greenday and tried to relate it to my life. The results were devastating. I received a poor grade on the paper for a number of reasons. The first being that the song I had chosen was not said to be “school appropriate” so I lost 15 points right away. I also didn’t even try to relate the song to my life, simply because I couldn’t find a song that fit my life very well. So, I simply choose a song that I liked and I choose Jesus of Suburbia. For part of the assignment we had to read our completed draft out loud in front of the class. Back in 8th grade I had a pretty bad speech impediment, and standing up in front of the class made me extremely nervous. While I was trying to read the assignment I got extremely nervous and lost my place and had to start over at least 3 times. Also, what bothered me in 8th grade was that the teachers, didn’t do much teacher revision, all of the editing before the final draft of the paper was turned in was done in a peer to peer setting. Now, I didn’t mind the teacher reading my paper but having a bunch of people whom I didn’t like knowing and reading my life story, as I tried to relate it to a song was a little embarrassing. However, for some reason 8th graders do not edit as hard as college educated teacher’s grade, so I lost quite a few points on the paper due to grammar problems, sentence structure, and a plethora of other areas of seemingly little interest to the average middle school student.

Cultural # 1

I went to a concert at Northminster Church. My friend’s band played. I think that this was a good cultural opportunity. He played the drums. Most of the music at the show was religious; however I usually do not like religious music. I liked it because of my friend’s band. I learned that music is fun. It was a good time. My friend and I went to my other friend’s house after the show and played guitar and talked. I think that this was a much better cultural opportunity then if I would have gone to a concert by a band or genre I enjoyed. This is because I think that when you do something that you do not like you learn a lot more. IT helps you explore other area’s. I usually hate going to and doing anything with any type of religious conitiations. This is because I don’t like going to church, most of the things they try to shove in my mind I don’t agree with. That’s not to say that I don’t believe in god because I do. I’ve actually read both the bible and the Koran and think that both have good morals. I think that what they say in church has nothing to do with the bible, and besides the bible has been so changed since the original days that I don’t even know what is true and what is false anymore. However, I enjoyed the concert and learned from it.

Writing

When I was in High School I hated school, writing, and doing work. This was for one simple reason. I did not get along with most of the teachers. For some reason I could never agree with the majority of them. There was one teacher with whom I was always butting heads. She by some unlucky miracle was my English teacher for my sophomore, junior, and the first semester of my senior year. At my high school for some odd reason some of the teachers believed that the point of the school was to discipline the students and not to teach them. My English teacher was one of those people. She stubbed out creativity, freedom, and excitement from her classroom. At one point one of my research paper received a failing grade after I had the teacher check it over for me and I made the corrections she had suggested. When I asked her why I got that grade she informed me that my view points were “too liberal” and that they did not accurately represent the truth. I was writing a paper about the gulf war and had suggested that the main reason for it had nothing to do with the freedom of a small country, but with the sheer amount of oil located inside Kuwait. Another time we were writing paper’s about constitutional issues in schools and I said that it should be illegal for police and school staff to search a student’s car or personal property without a warrant, after turning this paper in for some reason I had my car searched by the assistant principle. These experiences along with a plethora of other events helped me develop a mental block towards school work in general which in turn destroyed my GPA. However, I do NOT blame said teacher for my own poor grades in High School. Those are my responsibility and nobody else’s. But said English teacher, who will remain nameless, destroyed all self confidence I had in my writing ability.

Intro Letter

08/27/2009


Dear Stephanie:

Subject: Letter of introduction

The purpose of this letter is for me Joseph Scranton to formally introduce myself to you. In this letter I will inform you of my goals for the following semester and to introduce myself.
My name is Joseph Scranton and I was born in Peoria, IL in 1990. I grew up and attended Dunlap School District and in 2009 I graduated from my high school. In my spare time I like to play sports such as basketball, football, and baseball, and see movies with my friends. I like horror movies the best. I am going to ICC to major in History.
My first goal for the semester is to improve my writing structure. I believe I have a problem in formatting my papers and essays properly. I also feel that I have problems supporting my topic sentence in my body paragraphs. I also feel that my topic sentences at the beginning of my body paragraphs inadequately define the body paragraph. I also feel that my conclusion paragraph has problem’s restating the thesis sentence in the introductory paragraphs. I hope that through your class I may improve those areas.
I hope that through this letter you have learned about me.
Sincerely,

Joseph Scranton

First Blog Entry

Joseph Scranton
ENGL 110
09/1/09


Road Construction

The road construction which has recently over taken our state is I believe something to be happy about. It is good for quite a few reasons. One is that this road construction means one a large amount of hiring going out through the state. This will help to promote economic aid to the central Illinois area. This will mean more money being spent which in turn helps to economy go up because of the amount of increase in business throughout central Illinois. Second, after the construction is through there will be a noticeable difference in the quality of the roads throughout the area. This will be much easier on commuters traveling and will help consumers save gas money. The only downside of the road construction is the traffic. The traffic across the 150 bridge is horrible; commuters are backed up on miles of either side of the bridge in both directions. In the case of the road construction around the ICC campus and the rest of the central Illinois area the pros clearly outweigh the cons, and we should be overjoyed by the “excessive” amount of road construction in the area.